Musée des Beaux Arts by Wystan Hugh Auden

 


 

About the poet: Wystan Hugh Auden ( 1907-1973) is considered one of the leading poets of the thirties.Among his best known poems,  "Funeral Blues"; which is based on the theme of love,  "September 1, 1939" on political and social themes,  and "The Shield of Achilles";  , The Age of Anxiety; based on cultural and psychological themes and on "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae" religious themes .His work was inspired by the oeuvre of great literary figures like Hopkins and Eliot. The hollowness of the disintegrating, post war civilization , was also one of the major themes explored by Auden. He was an advocate of communism as well as Marxism. He revives the old concept that a writer is a professional craftsman who teaches and entertains, rather than expressing his personality which again contradicts the ‘egotistic sublime’ of the romantic poets.

On the poem: This poem is a typical poem which on one hand, focuses on human suffering, personal tragedy and indifference of  other people towards other’s misfortune on the other. "Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") was written by W. H. Auden in December 1938 while he was staying in Brussels, Belgium, with Christopher Isherwood. It was first published under the title "Palais des beaux arts" (Palace of Fine Arts) in the Spring 1939 issue of New Writing, a modernist magazine edited by John Lehmann. The poem encapsulates his experience of visiting the museum of the same name during his stay in Brussels that winter. He was immensely influenced by the painting of Pieter Brueghel, the elder. Bruegel's The Census at Bethlehem, The Massacre of the Innocents, and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus were the paintings described in the poem. The poem contains 21 lines and two stanzas.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Flowering Tree: A Woman's Tale by A.K. Ramanujan from an Ecofeminist perspective

  Ecofeminism or ecological feminism is a form of literary criticism stemmed from Feminism that explores the relations and similarities between woman and nature. The term was coined by French feminist   Francoise d’ Eaubonne in 1974.Ecofemism approach   aims to detect a certain similitude regarding the ill-treatment and oppression done by the patriarchal society in case of both women and nature. Women are as subjugated, exploited, and exploited by the phallocentric society as the environment, more precisely, the Mother Nature.   In the story of A Flowering Tree , ‘a sisterhood between a woman and a tree’ has been established subtly by the author who presented a metaphorical tale under the translucent cover of a folklore. The entire story reiterates the fact that one should treat a delicate flowering tree and woman with utmost care. There is also an implication that suggests a similarity between a flowering tree and a childbearing woman. The metaphorical ‘flowering tree’ is adroitl
Read more

Freedom to the Slave by H.L.V. Derozio:

About the poet: Henry Louis Vivian Derozio  (18 April 1809 – 26 December 1831) was an Indian  teacher  and assistant headmaster of Hindu College, situated in Kolkata,  a radical thinker who played crucial role in the Renaissance of Bengal and one of the first Indian educators to introduce Western learning and science among the young men of  Bengal . He was witnessing the tyranny of slavery, prevailing in the colonial India, part of which he adroitly reflected in the poem. About the poem: In this poem, the poet-persona expresses his notion of the true value of freedom to a slave. Only when human beings are free from the shackles of slavery, they can perceive the aesthetic aspects of life and human existence. To a slave, freedom is the feeling of being treated with the dignity that a man truly deserves. The poet persona imagines how the slave will feel, when he will be informed that he is no longer a slave. Receiving the news of his newly acquired freedom, his heart beats proudl
Read more

Sylvia Plath’s Mirror: Summary and Critical Appreciation

Sylvia Plath’s Mirror : Summary and Critical Appreciation    The poem is not at all enigmatic about its speaker as the very first line reveals the identity of the speaker-‘I am silver and exact’. In this poem the mirror describes its existence and its owner who grows older as the mirror watches. The first stanza describes the mirror, which seems to be like one of those people who don’t tell white lies-it’s truthful and exact but not cruel. The mirror describes itself as silver and exact. It is not judgemental about anybody but merely swallows what it perceives and reflects it back without any alteration. It considers itself a four cornered eye  of God, which sees everything for what it is .Most of the time the mirror looks across the empty room and meditates on the pink speckled wall  It has looked at the wall for so long that it describes the wall as ‘part of my heart’. The image of the wall is interrupted only by people who enter to look at themselves and the darkness that come
Read more